A. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to web page searches, and more particularly, to finding web pages relevant to a stream of information.
B. Description of Related Art
Many daily activities present information in the form of a stream of information, such as a stream of text or a multimedia stream. For example, radio and television news broadcasts provide a one-way stream of information to the viewers. Telephone calls, meetings, simple conversations with others, web browsing, desktop productivity applications (e.g. word processing, presentation generation, and email applications, etc.) also present information in the form of a stream. Often, people using this information could benefit from supplemental information related to the topics that are being discussed.
The World Wide Web presents a convenient source of supplemental information. Supplementing television broadcasts is particularly attractive due to the passive nature of television viewing. Interaction is severely constrained, usually limited to just changing the channel. There is no real way for the viewer to direct what kind of information will be presented.
One known attempt to supplement television broadcasts with web pages involves broadcasting entire hyper-text markup language (HTML) pages in unused portions of the television signal. A user watching television on a computer with a compatible television tuner card can then view these pages, even without an Internet connection.
Another known attempt to supplement television broadcasts involves broadcasting URLs in an alternative data channel interleaved with closed caption data. When a specially equipped box detects one of these URLs, it displays an icon on the screen through which the viewer may direct the box to fetch the corresponding web page over the Internet.
Both of these attempts to supplement television broadcasts, however, require the content producer to choose relevant documents and encode these documents (or document URLs) into the broadcast. This can be expensive for the producer and limits the viewer in both the number of broadcasts available with supplemental information and in the content of the supplemental information that the producer selected.
Thus, it would be desirable to better supplement multimedia broadcasts such as television broadcasts.